Jul 13, 2013

What the Zuck, Wlinkster? | The Wlinkster.com Craze

Back when Facebook started the idea of subscribers two years ago, the one profile which quite a lot of people subscribed to was that of Mark Zuckerberg. And why not? He is the founder of Facebook, and posts less than once a week on an average. His public posts were never spam, and usually contained interesting information. However, one thing has changed in recent times.

If you are subscribed to Zuck, you would inevitably find a comment which said something like the following.

What is Wlinkster ?

It's Not Just A Social Networking Website, It's The Way 2 Connect Your heart...

Main Features

► Apps Store.

► Video Chat.

► Live TV.

► World Cam.

► Tv Shows.

► New Movies.

► Share Ideas.

► Music.

► Games.

► Mobile Website.

► Create Groups , Pages & more...

I decided to give Wlinkster a try and see what the buzz is all about. After all, even Facebook once had just a few hundred users?

First things first. It's loading time is a bit too much and that pissed me off. Being a web developer myself, that is totally unacceptable. The home page itself has a size of 1.6 MB with a pretty big sized image as a background. Pingdom reports the loading time to be 6.86 seconds(Your website is slower than 79% of all tested websites). What the zuck?

Anyways, moving on, I registered (didn't need an email confirmation then, but apparently, now you need one) and was redirected to a page lol.php. Is this a joke? Your home page is named lol.php? There are perhaps a lot of web development related errors which are too much to go into in a single blog post. By the way, if you login and go back to wlinkster.com, it would appear that you are logged out!

Moving on, I wondered why not check the features that Wlinkster provides which Facebook doesn't. For video chat, it uses a third party plugin which requires you to sign in via Facebook or Twitter to use the feature. What an irony! Live TV is again some third party crap where nothing actually works.

That was it. I closed Wlinkster, never to visit it again. Well, at least, until certain things are changed.

The reason I came up with this is the horrible publicity of Wlinkster, which probably is getting them more haters. Why not improve the site first?

First there's spamming Zuck's posts. By now, he has already marked Sagar Rana's posts (the founder and "CEO" of Wlinkster) as spam, so he has gotten hold of some one else to do the same work.

I have also found this post on Quora, which talks of Wlinkster beating Facebook. There is just one answer to the post (which is of course stupid), and I quote

Coming to Sagar Rana Vs Mark Zukerberg. Every winner at some time will become the Looser. Now it's facebook turn, I believe there will be other guy like ------- will come again and change the game.

In addition to the fact that the answer has the poorest of poor grammar I have seen in a while, it is hopelessly optimistic too. Google Plus is having a hard time competing with Facebook and there are talks of Sagar Rana vs Mark Zuckerberg? Hell, I should rather start a political party and stand against Narendra Modi and Rahul Gandhi! In fact, I would become the Prime Minister before Wlinkster overtakes Facebook.

If you look at Sagar Rana's profile, you would find comments such as this.

Apparently, you would also find that there was a Wikipedia page for Wlinkster.com which was removed by the bot. I guess the great language used there was too much for the bot to decipher!

Coming back to the founder, you might be a good coder. You might have launched a semi-working social networking site after being highly inspired by the movie, The Social Network. But that doesn't mean you would go on a shameless self promotion to get users. What is the use if people leave after a single visit?

Although I mentioned third party stuff above, you must know that integrating them is not such an easy task. It is really commendable that at just 19 years of age, someone has come up with such a website with these features. Also, the fact that he chose PHP tells you that it must contain tens of thousands of lines of code to come with this.

One must commend his spirit- though an annoying, yet an innovative way to promote his site. At least, he's not 'buying' users like IIPM does! He's trying hard, I am sure, but it's not the right way.

The right way would rather be improving the site to at least provide some basic features with smooth functionality. Ten features working properly is far better than a thousand features where nothing seems right. Channeling the same energy, the same enthusiasm in the right direction is what's required.

I visited the "about us" page of Wlinkster, and I am bound to quote the first few sentences.

What Is Wlinkster ? It's tough to keep up with the world wide web when it keeps getting bigger and bigger each day. Wouldn't it be great if someone organized the web into topics you care about? We thought so too, so we created Wlinkster.

It seemed weird for two reasons. One that its perfectly good English (all Wlinkster related posts are in broken English). Secondly, how is a social network connected to organizing the web into topics? That is when I did a simple Google search and found out about Fanpop. Their about page has the exact same thing!

Also the little changes they have done to the text is given away by the awesome English.

We like to think of Wlinkster as the next generation of ing created for the Peoples by the Peoples.

They go on to copy Fanpop's description too!

Wlinkster is a network of user-generated fan clubs for different topics of interest created and maintained by the community of fans. Each fan club has a bunch of really cool features that empower the fans to share and discover content and interact with each other.

Sometimes a POET Who writes song DUET
Together we TWO Forms the best CREW
Don't even try to hack our SITE Baby u will suffer every NITE
Coz we know on the net how to FIGHT N don't take this warning LITE !!!

That gave me a good laugh. He should actually be a poet, "hacking" is just not his business! I have talked about hacking in a previous post of mine and would not repeat the same. BTW, Wlinkster has been down for the last few days and this page on Facebook gives you many screenshots after Wlinkster was hacked.